In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and repression were trying to reach safe havens in Europe. From his home in Norway, Tommy Olsen decided to travel to Greece, a major gateway for migrants and refugees. He joined hundreds of volunteers helping the new arrivals and later created an NGO, the Aegean Boat Report, which monitors the plight of asylum seekers in Europe.
Today, Olsen is a wanted man in Greece, caught up in a crackdown on refugees and people trying to defend their right to asylum.
“I didn’t know what I walked into,” Olsen says.
Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, has condemned Greece’s harsh migration policies and the way its government is targeting activists like Olsen. But she says Europe as a whole is also to blame.
“The whole notion of migration is a dirty word now,” she says. “The whole notion of refugees is a dirty word now.”
This week on Reveal, reporters Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk from the Berlin podcast studio ACB Stories take us to Greece, where refugees and human rights defenders face legal and sometimes physical attacks from authorities trying to seal the country’s borders.
Credits
Reporters: Dinah Rothenberg, Viola Funk, and Franziska Grillmeier | Producers: Steven Rascón and Michael Montgomery | Editor: Cynthia Rodriguez | Fact checkers: Kim Freda and Melvis Acosta | Legal review: James Chadwick | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, and by Reveal listeners.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. On most nights, Tommy Olsen sits in a makeshift office at his home in Tromsø, Norway, an island north of the Arctic Circle. He lives there with his wife and five kids. |
| Tommy Olsen: | I like to call it an office, but it’s not. It’s the hallway between the kitchen, and a bedroom, and a bathroom, and this is where I work. |
| Al Letson: | Tommy used to work with children with disabilities, but he gave up that job to run a hotline from his home. |
| Tommy Olsen: | It’s insane how many people contact me on a daily basis. |
| Al Letson: | It’s a hotline for migrants facing danger thousands of miles away, people risking their lives for a chance at getting asylum in Europe. |
| Tommy Olsen: | Like yesterday, I had 55. The day before, I had 37. |
| Al Letson: | The people who call Tommy are trying to reach Greece from Turkey, where almost four million refugees are now living. Some pay smugglers thousands of dollars. They travel in small boats. A lot can go wrong, and when it does, they call a stranger living in the Arctic for help. |
| Tommy Olsen: | It could be people who just have arrived on a Greek island, and they need medical assistance, and are afraid to contact authorities, or it could be people in distress at sea, people drifting in boats or life rafts. |
| Al Letson: | It’s a harrowing journey across the Mediterranean Sea. More than 28,000 people have died or gone missing since 2015. And back in January of 2022, the danger wasn’t just in the waters. |
| Speaker 1: | Please help for us as soon as possible. |
| Al Letson: | This woman was part of a group from Afghanistan. They had just reached the Greek island of Lesbos when she contacted Tommy. |
| Speaker 1: | We don’t want the police get us and pushed back again. We are scared after so much. |
| Al Letson: | Tommy says he’s received scores of calls like this before from people afraid of being hunted down. |
| Tommy Olsen: | By men in uniforms with black masks, carrying guns, driving around in cars without license plates in broad daylight. |
| Al Letson: | Think of Tommy as a 911 operator, only he’s not dispatching ambulances, he’s dispatching human rights workers in Greece, people who can show up to protect migrants from having their rights violated. Only in this case, no one came. And the situation got dire very quickly. Tommy says, “Masked men captured the group, put them into an inflatable life raft, and pushed them back into the sea.” |
| Speaker 1: | The Greek police caught us and left in the middle of the sea. |
| Speaker 2: | [inaudible 00:02:53]- |
| Speaker 1: | How? Help us. Come help us. |
| Al Letson: | Adrift in open water, the group was terrified. |
| Speaker 2: | Yes. [inaudible 00:03:01]- |
| Speaker 1: | The boat is not good. The water is coming inside the boat. All the children, 17 children that we have, we are here. |
| Al Letson: | In desperation, Tommy says he had to call the Turkish Coast Guard. Eventually they found the boat and rescued the men, women, and 17 children. Tommy was upset that no organization came to protect the group from being forcibly expelled from Lesbos, but he understands why. Helping save migrants is something that can land you in jail. And Tommy Olsen knows all about that. In Greece, he’s a wanted man. Today, reporters Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk from the Berlin Podcast Studio ACB Stories investigate how far one country is willing to go to stop the flow of migrants and punish human rights defenders. Here’s Dinah. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | To understand what’s happening in Greece today, you have to go back to the Greece of 2015. |
| Speaker 2: | [inaudible 00:04:03]- |
| Speaker 3: | The latest arrivals on Lesbos, as migrants continue to brave winter weather to get to Europe. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Nearly a million migrants entered the country that year. These were people fleeing repression and wars in places like Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. And the Greek islands were the gateway to asylum. |
| Speaker 4: | These people, as soon as the boat arrived, they were shouting, “Europe, Europe.” And they’re thanking God- |
| Speaker 2: | [inaudible 00:04:28]- |
| Speaker 4: | … for helping them to make that journey safely right here in the shores of Greece. |
| Speaker 2: | [inaudible 00:04:36]- |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Those who reached the islands were joyful, but others never made it. People were drowning by the hundreds. And news crews documented the shocking images. |
| Speaker 5: | Nothing has captured this crisis like the picture that we began with last night. The 3-year-old [inaudible 00:04:53] |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | A picture of the lifeless body- |
| Speaker 5: | … washed up- |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | … of a 2-year-old Syrian boy. He was dressed in a red T-shirt and had washed up, drowned on a beach. |
| Speaker 4: | It’s these images of Alan Kurdi that have finally brought the tragedy home to people in Europe and pricked the conscience of European leaders. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Governments and ordinary citizens were moved. Volunteers from across Europe descended on Lesbos and other Greek islands. They joined with locals to help rescue and support the new arrivals. Tommy Olsen was one of those volunteers. He was there on the beaches night and day. |
| Tommy Olsen: | We picked up people from boats who were already dead. We worked on children on the beaches who had drowned. I didn’t know what I walked into. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Tommy is low-key and can keep his cool, which helped him cope with what felt like a constant emergency. Soon he was traveling to Greece five or six times a year, and paying for the trips with his family’s holiday budget money. |
| Tommy Olsen: | Yeah, it was at times very tense in the family. They didn’t quite understand why I needed to do this. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | During this time, a powerful volunteer community took shape. Regular people were becoming human rights workers, including Tommy, who was mastering the geography of the islands and building a network of people centered on helping. |
| Tommy Olsen: | I had a pretty good network of people and organizations who I had daily contact with over WhatsApp and I started gathering information. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Soon, Tommy was documenting what was happening in Greece on Facebook. At first, he shared basic information. |
| Tommy Olsen: | Number of people in the camps, number of boats arrived, if there had been drownings, and of course the need of supplies. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | It was a way to say things like, “Stop sending baby clothes.” Tommy became a key source of information. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | After a few years, the welcoming attitude towards asylum seekers trying to reach Europe began to wane. Greece’s infrastructure was buckling, and other European countries weren’t helping enough. The mood started to shift from compassion to anger and fear. |
| Speaker 2: | [inaudible 00:07:18]- |
| Speaker 4: | There’s tension in the air on Lesbos, four days of civil unrest has people on edge. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Amid widening protests over the handling of the refugee emergency, a new government in Greece adopted tougher policies on migration. It was welcomed by some voters, but criticized by human rights groups. By 2020, Tommy found himself compiling evidence of what he believed were massive human rights violations by Greek authorities, scores of people being rounded up and illegally expelled from the islands. It’s all up on the website of his NGO, the Aegean Boat Report. |
| Tommy Olsen: | We document the situation in the sea to put spotlight on things that goes under the radar for journalists and big newspapers. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Tommy says exposing human rights violations is what’s made him a marked man in Greece. Also, there are new regulations that make it harder for volunteers like him to help the new arrivals. |
| Tommy Olsen: | If you bring people water or food after they arrive because it’s hot, they need something, you will be arrested for assisting them. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Only organizations registered with the government are allowed to help, and it’s mostly big NGOs like Doctors Without Borders that are able to meet the strict requirements. Smaller groups like Tommy’s find registering too difficult. Tommy believes all these tactics are a way to make the journey to Greece harder and more dangerous so that migrants will stay away, but people keep coming. Tommy says they’re just forced to take more risks. They come at night and land in very remote places where nobody can see them. |
| Tommy Olsen: | In 2015, they always took the boat and drove towards the light, because that’s where they knew there were people. That’s where they knew they got help. These days, lights means police, lights means pushback, light means being arrested, beaten, so they travel to the areas without any light. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | We spoke with a number of refugees who eventually reached Europe and they corroborated Tommy’s allegations. Several wouldn’t speak in front of a microphone. Some feared their asylum applications would be negatively impacted. Plus, recalling these memories is often re-traumatizing. But one woman agreed, provided we protect her identity. |
| Amali: | I’m 22 years old. I’m married, and I live here with my husband and my daughter. And I’m from Afghanistan. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | We are calling this woman Amali. She was born and raised in a community of refugees who fled Afghanistan for Iran back when the Taliban was coming to power. When she turned 18, Amali says her parents announced that they were planning to marry her off to an older man. She was devastated, but she had a plan. |
| Amali: | My dream was, “Okay, I’ll go to the Europe, everything will be good. Nobody can find me. The European people are kind, they will help me.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | But first, Amali would need to make it to Turkey. |
| Amali: | One night, we just leave everything, our life, and we escape from Iran to Turkey. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Amali and her husband lived in a refugee camp in Turkey and tried to apply for asylum there first, but were told applications were not being accepted. |
| Amali: | They told us, “It’s finished, it’s full. We have a lot of refugees here, and we can’t cover all. And I don’t know what you want to do, but you can’t stay here in Turkey.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | So they paid a smuggler to get them on a boat to Greece. By this time, Amali was pregnant and expecting her first child. The couple made it to Lesbos, which sits just a few miles away from Turkey. |
| Amali: | We arrived on the islands and I was so happy. I told myself, we were so happy, “Congratulations. We arrived. Everything is finished and we can start our life.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | That’s not what happened. They survived crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey, but they still aren’t safe. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | On Lesbos, Amali says her group walks for several hours in search of a refugee center. Before they reach any kind of town or village, a police officer crosses their path. Some of the people from her group panic and take off. |
| Amali: | But I told them, “Why are you escape? They are police officer. They can help us. Don’t escape.” And I told them, “Hello, can you help us? We are refugees. We want to stay here.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | The officer seems kind. His questions are polite, but as soon as other officers arrive and round up the group, the whole situation changes. |
| Amali: | Suddenly, I saw they are so angry. “Why are you coming here? We don’t want refugees here. Why are you come? It’s finished.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Amali is confused and doesn’t understand what’s happening. |
| Amali: | I told them, “You didn’t help us. You are a police officer. We are in danger. You should help me.” And they told us, “No.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Amali remembers it like this. The police officers leave. Then a new group arrives, men in dark blue clothing with balaclavas. The masked men start hitting people, pushing them. They separate the men and women and tell Amali to come with them. |
| Amali: | And I told them, “Okay, no problem.” My husband shouted and tell me, “Don’t go. Don’t go. Why? Where are you going?” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | What happens next is an alleged sexual assault and may be disturbing for some listeners. Amali says the man forced her to strip off all her clothes. They touch her and look for money in her private places. |
| Amali: | I told them, “Okay, that’s enough. I’m scared. I’m young. I can’t believe that I’m here.” And he told me, “Don’t come again. Don’t come back to Greece.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | They return her to the group and take away the other woman. |
| Amali: | One by one. And nobody speak about that. I just see everybody crying. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Then she says, they forced the men to line up and take off all their clothes in front of the women and children. Amali covers the eyes of a 2-year-old girl next to her. She says, “The masked men start beating the men with bells.” |
| Amali: | All of my husband’s body was black when we come back. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | What follows is something that refugees have reported to human rights groups and it’s been captured on cellphone videos and shared with people like Tommy. First, the men, woman, and children are forced into a van. Then they’re taken to a remote beach. |
| Amali: | There was so many people, about 20 person saw us, and they are laughing, they’re crying and they’re laughing, and every times they told us, “Don’t come back. Go back and told the other refugees to don’t come. Lesbos is finished. Greece is finished. Your dream, it’s not here.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | She says, “The armed man ordered the entire group into a life raft in the middle of the night. No engine, no steering, nothing. A boat drags the raft out into the sea. It’s pitch black and raining.” The men in the boat use long sticks to push them out into the open water towards the coast of Turkey. |
| Amali: | I can’t believe that this situation happening for me. I told them, “My life is finished. I don’t want this baby. I don’t want myself. I don’t want to be alive more. We will die here at the middle of the water.” Nobody helped. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Tommy Olsen has documented many cases like Amali’s on his website. He estimates that since 2017, Greek authorities have left 90,000 people drifting in the waters between Greece and Turkey. Over the course of nearly a year. We repeatedly asked the government for an interview, but we never got a response. We also sent them an email with the details of our investigation. But again, no one replied. In public press conferences and media interviews, the Greek government has strongly denied that armed and masked men were systematically pushing asylum seekers back out to sea. To Tommy, it’s obvious that the men not only exist, but act on behalf of the government. |
| Tommy Olsen: | You should try that in the city. Take a car, take off your license plate, put a balaclava on your head like a bank robber, and drive through town and see what happens. I think local police would pick you up pretty fast. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | To say that Tommy is outspoken is an understatement. And he’s made some enemies along the way. In Greece, newspapers have accused him of working in cahoots with smugglers, so have politicians. Then, in January of 2023, Tommy was notified that Greek authorities were charging him with being part of a criminal network. They allege that he helped eight people from Africa enter the country illegally by planning that trip with another man who was in Turkey at the time. He’s also facing charges. Tommy’s lawyer says, “The man was just a refugee trying to get asylum.” Prosecutors also allege this was all about making money. Tommy denies this and says he was defending people try to asylum, and the only money he makes is used to run his hotline and track human rights abuses. And lately contributions have been falling. |
| Tommy Olsen: | Foundations and organizations is very skeptical to financially support organizations who are currently under investigation. So I have issues finding, basically, funding. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Tommy was supposed to show up in a Greek court to defend himself, but through his lawyer, he refused. And the judge issued a warrant for his arrest. It’s only valid in Greece. So for now he’s safe. And he says he’s not giving up. He’s going to keep running his NGO. |
| Tommy Olsen: | We should perhaps remember what happened in the second World War. I think we are forgetting why these human rights and rules were made in the first place. It was to protect people. We are kind of now violating this and trying to build a wall around Europe to keep people out, I think it’s wrong. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Amali ran up against that wall a lot. It took her 11 tries, but she finally made it to Europe through Italy, not Greece. She was granted asylum. And now she and her family are living in Germany. |
| Al Letson: | As people continue to flee their homelands and head for Europe, there are still a small number of human rights defenders left on the Greek islands. And as they try to help new arrivals reach refugee centers safely, they also try not to get arrested themselves. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | If I pick you up, and you are a refugee, and I pick you up with my car, I’m a smuggler. If you inform the authorities before you help someone, then you are not a smuggler. This is a very thin line. |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. |
| Politician: | The Prime Minister of the Hellenic Republic, Mr. Kyriakos Mitsotakis. |
| Al Letson: | In July of 2022, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was invited to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. |
| Kyriakos Mitsot…: | Thank you Madam President, allow me to address this house in Greek. |
| Al Letson: | Mitsotakis painted an optimistic picture of his country, which a few years earlier had been on the brink of financial collapse. He touched on everything from energy policy to COVID. And after he spoke, members of Parliament got their chance to address the European leader directly. When the migration crisis came up, two German lawmakers reflected the views of many members of Parliament. |
| Lawmaker 1: | Europe is not to be criticized, but to thank Greece for protecting and defending our common external borders. |
| Lawmaker 2: | I’d like to thank you for your efforts in protecting Europe against the ongoing migrant invasion. |
| Al Letson: | There was one member who didn’t see it that way. What she saw was a humanitarian emergency that Greece was responding to with violence. |
| Tineke Strik: | If asylum seekers try to enter this Europe through your country, their rights are brutally trampled. They’re pushed into the Turkish waters and land. |
| Al Letson: | Tineke Strik is a member of the Dutch Greens political party, and she didn’t let up. She accused the prime minister of trying to silence anyone who tries to expose the mistreatment of migrants. |
| Tineke Strik: | But Prime Minister covering up evidence doesn’t help, because the reality is recorded and reported time and time again by all relevant bodies of the UN, Council of Europe, by ombudsmen, NGOs and investigative journalists. |
| Al Letson: | Mitsotakis has been confronted like this before. He knows the accusation, but he considers his government to be the guardian of Europe. |
| Kyriakos Mitsot…: | It is the right of every European member state to protect its borders with full respect for fundamental rights. This is exactly what Greece has been doing for the past three years. |
| Al Letson: | And he often says the same thing, that Turkey is to blame for failing to stop the smuggling operations that bring asylum seekers to Greece. |
| Kyriakos Mitsot…: | We have been successful in terms of breaking down the smugglers networks that have really exploited the desperation of weak and traumatized people by encouraging them to embark on a very dangerous journey. |
| Al Letson: | But to Strik, Greece is accusing innocent people of smuggling while allowing its own border guards to attack and intimidate asylum seekers. |
| Tineke Strik: | And the border guards are masked men putting lives at risk, enjoy impunity, but those who save lives are convicted. |
| Al Letson: | People who save lives. The human rights workers trying to protect millions of displaced people on the move. |
| Tineke Strik: | And therefore, I ask you, Mr. Mitsotakis, is this Europe? |
| Al Letson: | Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk of ACB Stories in Berlin went to the island of Samos to find out how people on the ground are still trying to help despite all the risks. Here’s Dinah. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Here you have an amazing 360 view. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Dimitris Choulis is a local lawyer who grew up on Samos. Before Greece became a major gateway for people seeking asylum in Europe, Dimitris was your typical criminal defense attorney. |
| Today, he’s one of the only human rights lawyers on the island, and he runs a non-profit called the Human Rights Legal Project. | |
| We’re standing on the rooftop of his office and staring out at the Aegean Sea. The water is a blend of deep sapphire and turquoise. Below us, four Coast Guard boats are lined up at the pier. | |
| The port police are over there? | |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Yes, it’s there. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | You can see it from here. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Yes, you can see the boats 1, 2, 3 in a row. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Turkey is just a few miles away, and these boats patrol the waters that surround Greece’s many islands. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | The orange one, it’s not in order to save people, but it’s pushing back people. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Dimitris’s clients come from places like Palestine, Syria, and Cameroon. Many of them have been forcibly expelled from Greece. And he says, these pushbacks are often done by Coast Guard boats like this one. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | In every pushback you can see it, it’s there. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | In 2023, the New York Times published a video of a pushback. It shows masked men delivering a group of migrants to the Greek Coast Guard. Then the Coast Guard abandons them in open waters. |
| Do you think the Coast Guards are aware that you have your office here and that you can actually watch them and their boats? When they leave? What time? How often they [inaudible 00:04:59]? | |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | They don’t care enough for this. They have seen me. I have seen them taking off their masks. They don’t care. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | We move inside Dimitris’ office. He splits up his time working here and at his favorite coffee shop, which is nearby. |
| Dimitris believes the law is on his side. In Europe, it’s illegal to interfere with someone’s right to seek asylum. And abandoning anyone at sea is also a violation of international maritime law. | |
| Yet, there have been no prosecutions. Instead, Dimitris says the Greek government is accusing NGOs of bringing migrants to Greece and twisting the work of human rights defenders into something that it’s not. | |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | I don’t want to bring refugees here. People are coming. The question is whether they will come safely or not. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | The accusations against human rights workers started several years ago when 24 volunteers were charged with money laundering, human smuggling and espionage. Suddenly their aid work, doing things like monitoring the Coast Guard’s radio frequency to know when boats were coming in, that was called spying. |
| Two volunteers were jailed for several months. The spying charges were dropped eventually, but the case is still pending. An official EU report found journalists have also been harassed, detained, and spied on. And there is Tommy Olsen, who has a warrant out for his arrest. | |
| Dimitris says many volunteers are gone now, leaving the sea between Greece and Turkey to the Greek Coast Guard with almost no one else to bear witness to what’s happening. | |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Until now, the intimidation from the government has worked. I think it shouldn’t. I think if you stood up, nothing would happen to you. It’s easy for me to say it because I’m Greek. I’m a lawyer. For someone who is not in his country and if he goes to prison, he won’t have the same support as I will have. Maybe it’s difficult. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Dimitris hasn’t backed down, but he does have to proceed with extreme caution. Unlike Tommy Olsen who operates from Norway, Dimitris is on Samos. So when someone calls, he can respond right away except, it’s not that easy because first, he has to make sure the caller has left Turkey. Or else Dimitris could be in danger of violating Greece’s anti-smuggling laws. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | If they contact us while they are in Turkey, “Tomorrow, we’re coming.” We’re not going. It’s illegal. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Even if they call Dimitris after they touch ground in Greece, it can still be dangerous. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | If I pick you up and you’re a refugee, and I pick you up with my car, I’m a smuggler. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | The law is open to interpretation. So Dimitris believes the best way to protect himself is to be transparent. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | If you inform the authorities before you help someone, then you’re not a smuggler. This is a very thin line. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | So each time he answers a call for help, this is what he does. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | So when we have their live location, we notify the authorities and then we run. You have to imagine it like a race. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | A race to see who gets there first. Police, the armed men in masks or Dimitris? |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | As you would expect, a Coffee Island coffee in my car, of course. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Over the course of a few days, Dimitris drives us all around Samos, pointing out the many places he’s rescued people. |
| So where are we going now? | |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | We will go the north side, so you will see some of the locations. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | And along the way, he explains how this race plays out. Once he receives a call, the first thing Dimitris says he does is notify both the local authorities and an NGO like Doctors Without Borders. That’s in case someone needs medical attention. And he does this all by sending an email. This is when the race begins and timing is crucial. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | We don’t want to send it after we are there because if they stop us for any reason and we haven’t send it’s a problem. But also we don’t want to send it from the office and then they have more time to us to go there. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | We make many stops. Sometimes at a beach or on the side of the road where he found people hiding. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | A lot of times you’ll see them up there in the mountain, climbing, go as high as they can to hide from the Coast Guard. And be away from the beach so they don’t put them back. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | On the north side of the island. He takes us to a location that he vividly recalls. It’s where a group from Syria and Palestine were found in January of 2023. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Here is where they found them. So they come from here, up. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | We’re standing in what looks like a parking lot. It’s surrounded by thick bushes and trees. At the edge, we look down a steep cliff. Dimitris pulls out his phone to show us text messages the group sent him. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Let me show you. 7 January 12:00, “We lack of foods and water. Please hurry, we are freezing, starving.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | They send Dimitris their GPS location several times and he replies. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | “It is illegal to push you back. Doctors will come in 30 minutes.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | He’s telling the group they have rights, that being pushed back is illegal and that doctors are on their way. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | “Be careful, so no one has any danger.” |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | This group of refugees had arrived overnight. There were three small children, young men, a pregnant woman, and this woman too. |
| Asil: | My name is Asil. |
| Translator: | My name is Asil. I’m 32 years old. I’m from Syria. I’m a teacher in Syria. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Asil is not her real name. She’s using a pseudonym because she’s worried about jeopardizing her asylum case. |
| Asil fled her hometown of Raqqah to escape war and repression from the militant group ISIS. She says she paid a smuggler and made the dangerous journey across the sea to Samos with 11 other people. | |
| Translator: | The children were very hungry and the small girl, she was around two years old, was crying because she was thirsty and hungry. So we calmed her down. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Samos is cold in January. Temperatures can dip down to below freezing. The vegetation is dense. Asil says, “The group tried to contact the smuggler for directions to the refugee center, but got no reply.” The only other number they knew to call was Dimitris’s. But before Dimitris and medics could get there, a group of men showed up. |
| Translator: | A gang of armed masked people, very big, very big. They had something in their face. They had sticks and guns and speakers like the police. So we were sitting and then they took us and lined us up. |
| They searched us and they took everything. They took the phones, the money, everything. Even the jackets we were wearing, they took it. | |
| Asil: | [foreign language 00:12:53]. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | The story Asil recounts matches testimony from other migrants like Amali, the woman from Afghanistan we heard from earlier. How they were beaten, strip searched, robbed, and held at gunpoint. Asil says she was scared for her life. |
| Translator: | So I started crying here. I lost hope because I thought I had to go back. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Just then, Dimitris and the team from Doctors Without Borders arrive. Local police show up too. |
| Sonia Balleron: | We all reach the location together, and then we do like we usually we start calling with a megaphone. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | This is Sonia Balleron, Doctors Without Borders, head of mission in Greece. |
| Sonia Balleron: | So we let them know that we are the doctors, we are here, and that if they need medical assistance, they can come and see us. |
| MSF Representat…: | We’re here to help. We have a doctor. We have food. Can you hear us? It’s the MSF. [foreign language 00:13:56]. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Asil was scared because she saw that the pregnant woman she was with was bleeding. |
| Translator: | In this moment, I started screaming and started calling for the organization. I started screaming that this is my sister who is in pain. |
| Sonia Balleron: | It was really screaming out of fear. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Asil says, when she cried out for help, one of the masked men grabbed her and hit her. |
| Translator: | He pushed me to the ground and sat on top of me, and he started to shut my mouth. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | But with Sonia’s team getting closer, Asil says, the masked man disappeared into the woods. |
| Translator: | I ran, and when I saw the doctor’s group in front of me, I started crying. There was a very nice lady with them. |
| Sonia Balleron: | And we start seeing one person coming and then another one, and they were screaming and they were crying, they were shaking. The emotional distress was so strong. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Sonia remembers the children, in particular. |
| Sonia Balleron: | Three of the children, they were miming with their hands. They were doing with their hands, they were doing the sign of a gun, crying. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Sonia’s team provided medical care and took the pregnant woman to the hospital. She says the psychological damage from these violent attacks can last for years. |
| Sonia Balleron: | You have people that are being beaten up and maybe there is no bruise, but there is a trauma inside. There is the fear of losing your life. There is the fear of being pushed back. It’s not visible, but the invisible wound and the invisible trauma that it leaves in people’s body and in their health is very, very big. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | Doctors Without Borders documented the experiences of its patients on Samos and Lesbos over a period of two years. In 2023, it released an official report about what they called, “Unidentified masked individuals.” |
| Sonia Balleron: | You have people telling you the same stories again and again, and it’s people who don’t know each other. It’s people that have arrived at a completely different time. One is in 2021, the other one, 2022. So it really shows the systematic nature of this violence. It’s not isolated. |
| Dinah Rothenberg: | With the police, medics and lawyers present Asil, and the group she was with were officially documented so they could register at a refugee center and apply for asylum. |
| A few days later, she and another woman from the group worked with Dimitris to file a lawsuit, accusing the Greek authorities of acts of torture, robbery, and abduction. | |
| During our time with Dimitris, we crisscrossed Samos many times. He was always low key. A lot of times, he would use dark humor while recording all these tragic stories. So I asked him how he was feeling. | |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Okay, you have an understand that we don’t feel anymore. We don’t have feelings, we don’t feel something. If you have feelings, you are getting burned out after a month. So no, no feelings, nothing. |
| Al Letson: | A few months after Asil arrived, a big shipwreck in another part of Greece made headlines. 600 migrants died. The Greek Coast Guard came under scrutiny for its involvement in this tragedy. The pressure was way up, and the masked men disappeared from Samos. But Dimitris says he and his teams still respond when people arrive because you never know when the situation can change. |
| And while thousands of people continue to be registered as asylum seekers in Greece, there’s still reports of people being pushed back to Turkey in the open waters. | |
| Coming up, the targeting of human rights defenders reaches the United Nations. | |
| Speaker 6: | They’re being smeared, threatened, and criminalized with increasing pressure and intimidation from the government. |
| Al Letson: | That’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. We’ve been talking about people who are risking their own freedoms to protect the rights of others and how in Greece human rights defenders are being targeted and accused of helping migrants enter the country illegally. To Mary Lawlor, this is part of a trend in many countries |
| Mary Lawlor: | Where the whole notion of migration is a dirty word now. The whole notion of refugees is a dirty word now. It’s a global crackdown on refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, and the people, the defenders who are supporting their legitimate rights in international law, in asylum law. |
| Al Letson: | In the parlance of the United Nations, Mary Lawlor is a special rapporteur, an independent expert who, in her case, monitors the status of human rights defenders. Her office receives hundreds of complaints each year, and she says they’re hardly limited to authoritarian countries. It’s democratically elected governments in Europe and elsewhere too. |
| Mary Lawlor: | What always amuses me is the States get up and they say all this good stuff about how great they are and how they support human rights defenders and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is on the ground, they are targeting human rights defenders. They are treating them unjustly. They are not abiding by the rule of law. They’re not abiding by the kind of standards that they would want for their own families. |
| Al Letson: | When Mary began her tenure at the UN in 2020, Greece was stepping up pressure on asylum seekers and people trying to defend their rights. People like Dimitris Choulis and Tommy Olsen. Mary’s office was flooded with complaints, so she decided to take a closer look. This is where Viola Funk of ACB Stories in Berlin picks up the story. |
| Viola Funk: | The first thing Mary Lawlor wanted to do was to get personal testimonies from human rights defenders. |
| Mary Lawlor: | And so we’re very, very glad to meet you all here today. |
| Viola Funk: | So her office organized a hearing. It was 2021. COVID was still surging, so they spoke online. |
| Mary Lawlor: | What I really need is your own specific situation and situation of other human rights defenders because that’s all I can act on. |
| Viola Funk: | The group told Mary stories about how authorities in Greece were denouncing some activists as enemies of the state and accusing them of working alongside human traffickers. |
| Tommy Olsen: | Such crimes as being part of a criminal organization, money laundering, forgery, fraud, facilitation of illegal entry. |
| Viola Funk: | People also told her how local media was stoking public anger by publishing unproven allegations. |
| Tommy Olsen: | Several times people in public have started screaming and shouting at me saying that I’m supporting refugees and I should leave from this place. |
| Viola Funk: | And then there was also Dimitris Choulis, the lawyer from the island of Samos. He told Mary about the challenges in trying to protect refugees and asylum seekers from illegal pushbacks. The people being forcibly pushed out to sea in rubber life rafts. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | It’s fierce. It’s violent. And the way it’s happening, it’s putting people’s lives in danger. |
| Viola Funk: | Like many of the others, Dimitris described being smeared in the local media for his work. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | One day I saw my picture in a pro-governmental newspaper saying that this is a traitor. |
| Viola Funk: | Tommy Olsen from Norway also testified about how authorities were targeting him with false accusations. |
| Tommy Olsen: | It was a clear attempt to intimidate me, to silence and resulted in death threats against me and my family. |
| Viola Funk: | Mary Lawlor heard from more than a dozen people. At the close of the meeting, she told the group all their work was being imperiled by a fortress mentality that’s taking hold across Europe. |
| Mary Lawlor: | It needs a serious response to what is happening. Trying to crush the spirit out of you all for your humanitarian action is not acceptable. So thank you very much. I’m sorry, I have to go now. |
| Viola Funk: | United Nations special rapporteurs have no real legal authority in the countries they report on. They conduct fact-finding missions and make recommendations so it’s part diplomacy, part detective work, and part shaming. Months after hearing from the embattled human rights defenders, Mary went to Greece to see the situation for herself. She met with government ministers and interviewed human rights workers. On her last day there, she held a press conference. |
| Mary Lawlor: | Hello, everyone. I’m going to speak quite loudly because the… |
| Viola Funk: | Audio is bad. Mary’s doing her best to project her voice. She starts by crediting Greece for taking more than its fair share of asylum seekers in Europe and for improving refugee centers. But most importantly, she credited human rights defenders for helping protect the most vulnerable and marginalized, often in the face of resistance. |
| Mary Lawlor: | I salute each and every one of them for their bravery and perseverance. |
| Viola Funk: | She expressed deep concern about the negative stigma that was being attached to the term NGO and the overall hostile atmosphere people were working in. |
| Mary Lawlor: | I also note the sense of pervasive fear that is felt by a significant segment of human rights defenders, which seems to be a direct result of the criminalization of migration. |
| Viola Funk: | Mary took what she learned in Greece and brought it to the UN in 2023. |
| Mary Lawlor: | Defenders active in this area are under severe attack in Greece. |
| Viola Funk: | She did acknowledge that Europe as a whole was also at fault for failing to develop a fair and equitable system for asylum. But she said. |
| Mary Lawlor: | This in no way justifies the violation of the rights of refugees and migrants and those who seek to protect them from pushbacks and other attacks. I urge the government to consider the findings of my report and take action. |
| Viola Funk: | In her report, Mary laid out 27 recommendations for the Greek government, including dropping criminal charges against human rights defenders. But today, nearly two years later, she says Greece has taken few, if any, concrete steps to address her main concerns, leaving open the possibility that people like Tommy Olsen could end up in a Greek prison. Mary still remembers her meeting with Tommy, Dimitris, and the others. |
| Mary Lawlor: | They were journalists, they were lawyers, or they were just ordinary people trying to engage in simple acts of solidarity. And they were all under severe pressure, and it all seemed to be in a very coordinated and deliberate way. |
| Viola Funk: | Mary says around the globe, governments are evading accountability for their attacks on people defending the rights of migrants and refugees, and also framing migration as something dangerous, a national security issue. |
| Mary Lawlor: | And that means that people who are fleeing oppression or fleeing suffering or poverty are completely dehumanized by the authorities and the system and those that are trying to insist that the state protects and respects their human rights are vilified and smeared. |
| Viola Funk: | The global crackdown on human rights defenders ultimately affects the migrants and refugees they are trying to save. Dimitris Choulis knows this reality all too well. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | First time I’m coming, sharing at night. |
| Viola Funk: | On our last day in Samos, I’m with my reporting partner, Dinah Rothenberg. We’re driving with Dimitris to a remote cemetery on the southern part of the island. He says, “This is where the local government buries migrants who died while trying to reach Europe.” And these funerals, what do they look like? Who’s coming? |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | No one. Beatles have a very nice song, Eleanor Rigby. You have to listen to it. |
| Viola Funk: | It’s a famous song about a woman named Eleanor Rigby who dies and nobody seems to notice. Nobody comes to her funeral. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | So it’s the same here. It reminds me of the song. No one is here. |
| Viola Funk: | Dimitris has been here many times, but it’s his first time here at night. We use the flashlights on our phones to see. The actual cemetery sits behind a stone wall, but Dimitris wants to show us what’s outside the walls of the cemetery. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | We are now in the middle of the forest. All these things you see. |
| Viola Funk: | Wait, what? |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | These things are graves. |
| Viola Funk: | Dimitris is pointing to small mounds of dirt on the ground each with a number. These are the graves of deceased migrants. He says only a few have plaques that were put there by their families. But for most, there’s just a number. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Number 28. If you go closer or if it’s there, you will see more numbers. Number 30 there. |
| Viola Funk: | These aren’t the only unidentified graves of migrants. An investigation by a European Media Collaboration found that more than a thousand refugees who died at the borders of Europe were buried before being identified. More than half of those graves were discovered in Greece. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | So everywhere. Number 31, small, seems like a child. |
| Viola Funk: | So on the graveyards you only see numbers and the year. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Yes. |
| Viola Funk: | Not even names. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Nothing, because they are unknown. |
| Viola Funk: | We step over each grave quickly catching a glimpse of the numbers. Do you have any idea how many people are buried here? Dimitris points at the ground. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | So the last number we see there is number 33, so at least 33. |
| Viola Funk: | Inside the stone wall, in the actual cemetery, there are headstones with names. Most are the graves of Greek people, but there are a few migrants buried here too. Because once Dimitris and his organization realized that people were being buried unidentified, they started to organize proper funerals. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | It’s me and the people that funded the project. We decided that we have to do something more. What we try to do, we try to put the name and the plaque with his name and the day that he died. |
| Viola Funk: | Dimitris shows us the grave of a 5-year-old Afghan boy named Yaya Ayoubi. Yaya drowned while his family was trying to reach Samos. |
| Dimitris Chouli…: | Here we put a plaque. We have something in his language, and then we have in Greek that it wasn’t the sea or the air, it was the policies and the fear that caused this. |
| Viola Funk: | It wasn’t the sea or the air, it was the policies and the fear that caused us. What Dimitris means is this. If applying for asylum wasn’t so dangerous and if fear wasn’t driving people to hide and risk their lives, then maybe those who’ve died would still be here today. |
| Al Letson: | This week’s show was produced in collaboration with Dinah Rothenberg and Viola Funk from the Berlin Podcast Studio ACB Stories. Our lead producers were Steven Rascón and Michael Montgomery. Cynthia Rodriguez edited the show. Special thanks to reporter Franziska Grillmeier, Weida Hamdan, and Reveal’s Nadia Hamdan. Fact-checking by Kim Freda and Melvis Acosta. Legal review by James Chadwick. |
| Our production managers are the Wonder Twins, Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando My Man Yo Arruda. Our theme music is by Kamarado Lightning. Support for reveals provided by The Reva and David Logan Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and The Hellman Foundation. | |
| Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. Reveal is the co-production of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |